≈≈ The old Drakoni inhabited all of the large rooms in the bottom of the tower. In Alessa’s tower, there were her room and her father’s room, and six other rooms that also were used as living quarters, including those of the harbormaster, the dockmaster, several ship captains who made the town their homeport, and Alessa’s old nurse, Mara. Alessa didn’t know to what purpose Hanno put all the rooms in his tower. She had only ever been in two of them. The main one, where he kept his books and received visitors, had become a classroom for Alessa. Hanno had taken her on as a student, at Allyn’s request. There, he taught her math and science, languages and geography. She had also been in the adjoining room, a laboratory where Hanno had guided her experiments in chemistry, biology, and physics. Alessa loved this room. The walls were covered with a wooden framework containing hundreds of drawers, all sizes, big ones, small ones, wide ones, narrow ones. Each drawer had a unique intricately-carved wooden pull directly in it’s center. Hanno would send her looking for items for him in the drawers occasionally. “It’s in the butterfly drawer,” he’d say, or “the drawer with the Mykara bloom on it.” She had spent hours examining the drawer pulls, admiring the care of the carver, the exacting detail in each pull. She suspected Hanno had carved them himself. ≈≈